Friday, December 29, 2006

The World's Museums Contain Innumerable Fakes

The next time you're marveling at a painting by Picasso, a statue by Michelangelo, or a carvingfrom ancient Egypt, don't be absolutely sure that you're looking at the genuine article. Art fakeryhas been around since ancient times and is still in full swing — museums, galleries, and privatecollections around the world are stocked with phonies. This fact comes to us from an insider'sinsider — Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New YorkCity. In his book False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, he writes:The fact is that there are so many phonies and doctored pieces around these days that attimes, I almost believe that there are as many bogus works as genuine ones. In the decadeand a half that I was with the Metropolitan Museum of Art I must have examined fiftythousand works in all fields. Fully 40 percent were either phonies or so hypocriticallyrestored or so misattributed that they were just the same as forgeries. Since then I'm surethat that percentage has risen. What few art professionals seem to want to admit is that theart world we are living in today is a new, highly active, unprincipled one of art fakery.Ancient Egyptian objects are particularly likely to be bogus. Furthermore, Hoving estimates thatthe fraud rate for religious artifacts from pagan and early Christian times is literally 99 percent.As many as 5,000 fake Dürers were created after the master's death, and half of Vienna masterEgon Schiele's pencil drawings are fakes.

But it isn't just current con artists making this junk; the ancients did it, too. For around amillennia, Romans couldn't get enough of Greek statues, gems, glasses, and other objects, soforgers stepped in to fill the demand. Hoving writes:The volume was so great that Seneca the Elder (ca. 55BC - AD 39) is recorded by a contemporaneous historianas remarking that there were no fewer than half a dozenworkshops in the first century AD working full time inRome on just colored gems and intaglios. Today it'salmost impossible to tell what's genuinely ancient Greekand what's Roman fakery, because those gems andintaglios are made of material that dates to ancient timesand the style is near perfect.Art forgery isn't the realm of nobodies, either. Duringcertain periods of their lives, Renaissance mastersDonatello and Verochio put bread on the table by creatingfaux antiquities. Rubens painted copies of earlier artists. ElGreco's assistants created five or six copies of their boss'work, each of which was then passed off as the original (andthey're still wrongly considered the originals).Hoving reveals that pretty much every museum has at one time or another been suckered intobuying and displaying fakes, and many are still showing them. Of course, most of the exampleshe uses are from the Met, but he also says that phony works still sit in the Louvre, the Getty, theBritish Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Vatican, among others. (Hovingestimates that 90 percent of the ancient Roman statues in the Holy See's collection are actuallyeighteenth-century European knock-offs.)Revealing further examples, the Independent of London catalogs three Goyas in the Met that arenow attributed to other artists; Rodin sketches actually done by his mistress; Fragonard's popularLe baiser à la dérobée (The Stolen Kiss), which seems to have been painted by his sister-in-law;and many Rubens works actually created by the artist's students. According to the newspaper:"The Rembrandt Research Committee claims that most works attributed to Rembrandt were infact collaborative studio pieces."It's enough to make you question the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.